BONGPYEONG, South Korea — The world’s best snowboard cross athlete, Lindsey Jacobellis, has won every major race in her sport except the biggest. And she was unable fill that Olympic void Thursday, missing the PyeongChang medal podium by a fraction of a second.

In her first Olympic final since winning silver in the 2006 debut of snowboard cross in Italy, the 10-time X Games medalist and five-time world champion pulled up oh-so-slightly over the final jump to avoid a fallen rider. Mere feet from the finish line, maybe that cost her the .04 seconds she needed to find bronze.

“If I didn’t really have that, who knows? Maybe I could have snuck in a for medal, but at the end of the day, I want to be safe and not blow my knee or get injured again,” said the 32-year-old Vermont pioneer of snowboard cross who led for the first half of the dramatic final. “This is definitely the only thing I have not won, but it’s not something that’s going to define me.”

In yet another thrilling final race, America’s best hope for a women’s snowboard cross medal finished fourth, just as her American teammate Nick Baumgartner did Wednesday. The PyeongChang Olympics marks the first time American snowboard cross athletes have failed to medal since the 2006 Games. Italy’s Michela Moioli won gold ahead of France’s Julia Pereira de Sousa Mabileau. The Czech Republic’s Eva Samkova, who won gold in the 2014 Sochi Olympics, took bronze, again racing with a painted mustache on her lip.

It’s rare to be consistent in Olympic snowboard cross racing. It’s a capricious sport, where any of the six-at-a-time racers can eke out a win. Of the 24 Olympic snowboard cross medals men and women have won since 2006, only four athletes have won two. The jumps and berms in the winding Olympic courses can often overshadow even the most obvious talent. Winners often get lucky.

“I finished the best I could today. If we ran the race tomorrow, it could be a whole different story. It’s the winner of this day and it doesn’t define me as an athlete,” she said. “I’ve been doing this sport for 20 years and that’s a lot longer than some of these girls have been alive.”

Her younger teammates, Eagle’s Meghan Tierney and three-time Olympian Faye Gulini of Utah, were unable to advance beyond Friday’s first quarterfinal heat. Their teammate Rosie Mancari injured her ankles in training and did not compete on Friday.

Tierney, 21, got close to advancing out of her quarterfinal, falling on the third-to-last step-up jump. She was 11 when Jacobellis started coaching her at camps at Oregon’s Mt. Hood and counts Jacobellis as a mentor.

“She’s really helped me get to where I am,” said Tierney, who said a little prayer in the starting gate to her grandfather, her tireless supporter who passed a couple months ago.

“He was very tough and he knew I could be just as tough as him.”

Tierney remembers watching Jacobellis in Italy’s 2006 Olympics and she felt a spark to race snowboards. That was the year Jacobellis won her silver. Which wasn’t really a victory. She had the gold in sight when, with a long lead, she flashed a bit of style with a tweak and grab on the penultimate hit and fell. That notorious method grab has haunted her ever since. The sour silver comes up every Olympics and she has to answer a steady stream of questions about the now 12-year-old mistake.

“How often do you remember the second-place medalist,” she said, laughing but not really stoked to be talking about that decision to showboat she made in a race in 2006.

She has spent her career since that moment becoming the most decorated athlete in snowboard cross racing, winning five of the last seven world championships. Later this season she is hosting the first-ever all-women snowboard cross at the Supergirl Snow Pro event at California’s Bear Mountain. She hopes the event seeds a new generation of snowboard cross women who can follow her path.

There’s no question Jacobellis has left her mark on snowboard cross. Even if her highlight reel includes the not-so-flattering grab that lost gold.

“If nothing else, it gave my sport a ton of recognition,” Gulini said. “When I tell people what I do, the first thing they say ‘Is that the sport where the girl threw away the gold medal?’ And I’m like, ‘at least you know what I do.’ There are a lot of athletes whose results don’t measure up to who they are and I think she has done incredibly. She’s the best at this sport. I think she’s doing just fine despite that mistake.”

Jason Blevins covers tourism, mountain business, skiing and outdoor adventure sports for both the business and sports sections at The Denver Post, which he joined in 1997. He skis, pedals, paddles and occasionally boogies in the hills and is just as inspired by the lively entrepreneurial spirit that permeates Colorado's high country communities as he is by the views.

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